Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Toward Transpacific Ecopoetics: Three Indigenous Texts

2013; Penn State University Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/complitstudies.50.1.0120

1528-4212

Hsinya Huang,

Indigenous Studies and Ecology

In this article, I employ “the Pacific” as a contact zone, method, and concept with which to examine the dynamic, shifting relationship between land and sea that allows indigenous literature in the transpacific context to engage all of its ecopoetic complexity. The Pacific is the largest oceanic divide on earth. In recent years, issues around global capitalism, national identity, community, and the ecology of the Pacific region have sparked intriguing and provocative discussions. Research along these lines celebrates the networking and coalition activities of various groups of people in the Pacific, and highlights the circulation of ideas and cultures that I believe to be crucial to contemporary ecological scholarship. It offers an oceanic perspective that serves as a counterweight to continental ways of thinking, and it supplements or challenges transnational approaches to imperialism, postcolonialism, indigeneity, globalization, and ecology.1A recent special issue of the Contemporary Pacific titled “Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge” examines uncharted spaces of the Pacific Islands and historicizes indigenous discourses about making landfall, showing how they have contested the production of new transoceanic environments. The articles in this special issue “explore notions of Pacific indigeneity as they circulate through geographical, cultural, political, and historical flows of people(s), things, knowledge, power—between islands and continents.”2 As the United States and China battle over this geographical space, the message from the indigenous Pacific can be inspiring: neighboring communities have always exchanged ideas and products, often across vast oceanic distances. It was a large world in which indigenous people intermingled along numerous interconnecting routes, unhindered by the boundaries erected much later by imperial powers. Indeed, the recent wave of research on transnational Pacific indigeneity has contributed significantly to the study of both the environment and literature. For instance, Elizabeth M. Deloughrey's Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (2010) moves beyond restrictive national, colonial, and regional frameworks, highlighting how island histories are shaped by oceanic environments. Engaging oceanic literary studies in a sustained dialogue, Deloughrey borrows Kamau Brathwaite's idea of “tidalectic” between land and sea as a dynamic starting point by which to identify a nexus of historical process and seascape, intertwining geography and history in her exploration of how island writers inscribe the complex relation between routes and roots.3I conceptualize the contours of indigenous communities as crossing national, regional, and international boundaries, and I formulate a platform on which to carry out a cross-cultural comparison of indigenous ecopoetics across the Pacific. I aim to offer an alternative rubric of the “transindigenous” for the study of literature and the environment and to represent center-to-center, indigenous-to-indigenous relationships and connections in the Pacific as a site of transindigenous solidarity that seeks to protect oceanic environments.Chadwick Allen's essay “A Transnational Native American Studies? Why Not Studies that are Trans-Indigenous?” challenges us to think beyond “the national borders of contemporary (settler) nation-states” and to focus on indigenous-to-indigenous relationships instead. He reminds us that conventional theories of the transnational operate on a “vertical binary” that subordinates indigenous peoples. As we work toward a new model, which Allen calls “transindigenous,” we need to treat indigenous texts “on their own complex and evolving terms.”4 I move toward a transpacific and transindigenous ecopoetics that promises to preserve an ocean and offer a vision of transnational belonging, ecological confederation, and indigenous solidarity. Drawing on Linda Hogan's 2008 People of the Whale (fictionalized Makah, North American West Coast), Witi Ihimaera's 1987 Whale Rider (Maori, New Zealand/Aotearoa), and Syaman Rapongan's 2012 天空的眼睛 (Eyes in the Sky) (Aboriginal Taiwan Tao), I convene a shared oceanic poetics across diverse indigenous cultures in the Pacific region. Like the rooted and routed indigenous people of the Pacific, these works begin in salt water and subsurface earth and aquifers and trace ecological connections across the waters. A transpacific and transindigenous ecopoetics bring to the fore an alternative model of reckoning space, place, and time that requires active, participatory engagement with the Pacific seascapes while simultaneously necessitating a planetary consciousness. All three authors navigate a course that is not overdetermined by the trajectories of imperialism and colonialism. All sustain a paradigm of transindigeneity, of rooted routes, of a mobile, flexible, and voyaging subject who is not physically or culturally circumscribed by terrestrial boundaries. Their poetics and imagination, I would argue, center on a restored continuum of human and oceanic nonhuman beings and participate in the emergence of multispecies ecopoetics rooted in the indigenous stories and myths of the Pacific. Their works do not merely transcend the national, international, and cultural borders erected by colonial powers but also transgress the demarcation between the human and the nonhuman, to which our modernity tightly clings. By placing these maritime works in dialogue with one another, this article underscores the shared history of the Pacific indigenous peoples and their complex historical relationships to the waters and to the cosmic beings surrounding them; this analysis then shakes loose a critical paradigm of center-to-center dialogues, that is, of transindigeneity vis-à-vis transnationality.Rob Wilson, among many others, comments on the ecological problems of the Pacific Ocean and islands, which are so “rich in oil, natural gas, fishing and mineral resources” that nations are fighting over islands and even specks of rocks to stake their claims.”5 The waters of the Pacific also inevitably become the disposal site for human-created waste, from oil spills to radioactive contaminants, “filled with the heaviness of our military history and technological blunders.”6 The ocean remains uneasily amenable to territorial demarcations of national or marine sovereignty, and yet, as a planetary element necessary to sustaining life and well-being, “the ocean could become the means to envisioning ecological solidarity, if compellingly framed in terms that elicit consent and inspire an imagination of co-belonging and care.”7 “Earth is a misnomer,” notes Wilson, citing Ed Delong who urged that “the planet should be called Ocean,” registering his marine microbiologist's sensibility for the ocean as a shared planetary fluid that comprises some 90 percent of our biosphere.8 Threatened with techno-human endangerment, as Wilson puts it, “the ocean calls for broader planetary reckoning as species origin, instrument, analogue, and end.” Wilson continues: “Whales, dolphins, coral reefs, and marine microbes … appeal for a more worlded sense of co-dwelling” that connects beings “across various scales of lung/brain/blood/water/air/linkage.”9Indeed, ocean-nurtured beings are to be seen as a planetary commons. William Boelhower observes that notions of “common humanity, common wealth, and common ground” hinge on a highly appealing and irrepressible planetary consciousness.10 This consciousness is often expressed through the concept of a planetary commons—a commons that is dependent on the health of the nonhuman environment as well as on humanity's recognition of belonging to local and ecological communities. The three targeted indigenous texts in this article regard the Pacific Ocean as a site of cobelonging and cohistory across species boundaries and racial/ethnic and cultural borders. Their authors view the whole Pacific Rim as a planetary bioregion and see oceanic beings as a commons that makes the ocean a geologically interactive space. Their stories, images, and legends give a deep sense of Pacific cobelonging.The Pacific ecologies influenced by the long-woven networks of interconnected reciprocity prove crucial, given that the ocean's spaces are linked. These ecologies also serve to counter colonial and national demarcation.11 In his seminal essay, “The Ocean in Us,” Epili Hau'ofa, Tongan writer, critic and activist, advances the notion of forms of ecological solidarity across the Pacific (or “Oceania,” as he calls it).12 Joni Adamson and Jonathan Steinwand investigate ecological knowledge and communication in the Pacific Northwest Coast and New Zealand through the critical figure of the whale.13 There is even more activity around site-based work and studies of the dynamics of cultural production in Asia and the Pacific. In Taiwan, for example, a whole school of cultural study now links Taiwanese aboriginal studies to both Native American transnational frameworks of transindigenous belonging and to a contemporary connection with oceanic frameworks. This school of study has the potential to unsettle territorial ties to the Chinese mainland and reframe this decentered island as a place long connected to the Pacific Ocean.14 In my article on these oceanic ties, referencing the work of Rapongan, who hails from Orchid Island (the site of antinuclear protests in the 1980s and long a part of Austronesian culture), and Hau'ofa, I contend that through their own lived experience, as well as that of their island kin, Hau'ofa and Rapongan conceive of Oceania as a communal (sea) body, through which they can ultimately resist the imaginary political lines drawn by colonial powers. Their narratives turn hyper-modernized Pacific islanders (like themselves) back towards a perception of bodily identities as individual projects in intimate connection with Oceania.15Rapongan, like Hau'ofa, represents Oceanic peoples as custodians of the sea who “reach out to similar people elsewhere in the common task of protecting the seas for the general welfare of all living things.”16 Rapongan's work envisions an archipelagic region in the Pacific, reshaping Taiwan as a place linked to Austronesian modes of language, space, body, and culture: 「世界地圖是什麼意思，一個島接一個島在大洋洲，他們皆有共同的理想，便是漂泊在海上，在自己的海面，在其他小島的海面，去追逐內心裡難以言表的對於海的情感。也許是從祖先傳下來的話。」達悟就是吃飛魚長大的不變的真理，飛魚是生存在海裡，千年來此不移的情感，在生出來的那一刻即孕育的了。17(What does the “world atlas” mean? A chain of islands in Oceania. The islanders share common ideals, savoring a freedom on the sea. On their own sea and the sea of other neighboring islands, they are in quest of the unspoken and unspeakable passion for the ocean or maybe in quest of the words passed down from their ancestors.) Rapongan's Tao ancestors used to move freely in the Pacific Ocean, following the migratory route of the flying fish that are subject to the flow of the Kuroshio Current. This north-flowing current on the west side of the North Pacific drives the flying fish migration, which, in turn, shapes and reshapes the migratory route of the island indigenes. Because of the regular movement among the islands, Pacific Islanders conceive of their environment as an extensive, communal body that follows the pathway of the current. The sense of community encompasses not only similar human beings on the seas but nonhuman species, generating a widening circle of associations. Because Tao people feed on the flying fish and center their rituals and calendars on the movement of the fish, this means that both humans and nonhumans traverse the Pacific, deterritorializing the ocean. At the very outset of 黑色翅膀 (Black Wings), an autobiographical novel published in 1999, Rapongan writes: 飛魚一群一群的，密密麻麻地把廣闊的海面染成烏黑的一片又一片。每群的數量大約三、四百條不等，魚群隊相距五、六十公尺，綿延一海哩左右，看來煞似軍律嚴謹出征的千軍萬馬，順著黑潮古老的航道逐漸逼近菲律賓巴坦群島北側的海域。18(The dense schools of flying fish dye patches of the wide and vast ocean black. Each school consists of three or four hundred fish, swimming about fifty or sixty meters apart. They stretch unbroken for one nautical mile and they look like a mighty military force going into battle. They follow the ancient course of the Kuroshio Current, gradually heading toward the sea north of Batan in the Philippines.) Shortly after this, Rapongan adopts the perspective of the flying fish: 亙古以來，牠們的祖先說過：故鄉的主人，在每年冬末春初時節，皆按照其祖靈的訓語，定時舉行manawag so amomg no rayon (遙祭飛魚祖靈日，泛稱招魚祭)。只有故鄉的主人以最虔敬的心、最神聖的儀式祭拜我們；只有游到故鄉方真正體驗到我們跟人類的地位是平等的，甚至被看待為善神。19(Since time immemorial, their [flying fish] ancestors have told them: at the turn of winter and spring each year, masters at your home base would observe their ancestral instructions and organize manawag ao amomg no rayon [a flying fish festival] to pay tribute and show reverence to the ancestral spirits of flying fish; they are the only ones that worship us with pious hearts and sacred rituals; only when we return to our home base would we be treated with respect as good gods and considered equal to the human beings.) The story of the reciprocal connections between the human race and the flying fish represent the major lesson that was passed down to the flying fish from their ancestors. The same lessons of inheritance repeat themselves in the dialogues between the Tao father and his son. Human and nonhuman are tied in the circle of ecological interdependence as depicted in Rapongan's 1997 冷海情深 (Cold Sea, Deep Passion). The father tells the son a mythical story about how in the distant past, flying fish jumped out of the ocean and landed on the reef. They let the Tao ancestors learn about their diverse kinds: “飛魚的酋長—『黑色翅膀』就這樣教育了我們的祖先，如何食用飛魚，如何撈捕牠們，如何祭祀牠們” (75) (“In this way the chief of the flying fish, Black Wing, educated our ancestors how to eat flying fish, how to catch them, and how to offer sacrifices to them”).The intimate connection and interaction between human and nonhuman also informs the thematic concern of Rapongan's 天空的眼睛 (Eyes in the Sky), in which he relates the kinship between humans and fish, ecology and creatures. Through the eyes of a whale, he opens up the large world of “the planet as ocean” or “ocean planet.”20 In his essay “What the Whales Would Tell Us,” Jonathan Steinwand examines what he terms the “cetacean turn” in environmentalist iconography as exemplified by indigenous-authored novels about human relationships with whales.21 As Steinwand reads novels by Ihimaera, Hogan, Zakes Mda, and Amitav Ghosh, he observes that both whales and indigenous peoples are depicted as compelling figures because of their “liminality and ambiguity.”22 Just as whales constantly negotiate the boundaries between the worlds of air and water, indigenous and marginalized ethnic peoples negotiate “the boundaries of the dominant ‘civilization’ and wild nature, of traditional pre-modern and postmodern late capitalist lifestyles.”23 Steinwand's argument draws on Lawrence Buell's analysis in Writing for an Endangered World of the relationship between whales and indigenous peoples in contemporary environmentalist iconography. While I fully agree that whales and indigenous peoples are significant iconic figures for contemporary ecocriticism, they are by no means to be considered as “liminal,” “ambiguous” or even opaque. To link indigenous peoples with whales in terms of their “liminality and ambiguity” duplicates the violent legacies of colonial invaders and reinforces the fallacy of modern anthropocentrism. The modern condition, as Bruno Latour argues, arises from the absolute separation of human culture from nonhuman nature.24 The asymmetry between nature and culture then becomes an asymmetry between past and present. The past was a time when the boundaries between human and nonhuman were blurred; the present is marked by the complete separation of the two. The difference between an advanced Western culture and premodern/primitive cultures is that the former sets nature apart from culture, while the latter mixes them up and mistakes culture for nature.25 This first “great divide” accounts for a second, more consequential one: “we” (modern Europeans) are the only ones who differentiate absolutely between nature and culture, between science and society, whereas the “others” (primitive natives) cannot really separate a sign from a thing and cannot distinguish between what comes from nature as it is and what is required by their cultures. The partition between humans and nonhumans thereby defines a second partition between “us” and “them,” condemning the primitive/native to a fittingly vanishing category belonging to the premodern era. As Latour asserts, the very notion of culture is an artifact that is created by bracketing nature off.26Therefore, as Chadwick Allen cautions us, it is crucial that our studies of the indigenous do not duplicate the vertical binary of “the Indigenous (always) tethered to (and positioned below) the settler-invader,” which may result in “an engulfment of the Indigenous within and beneath systems of meaning-making dominated by the desires, obsessions, and contingencies of non-Indigenous settlers, their non-Indigenous nation-states, their non-Indigenous institutions, their non-Indigenous critical methodologies and discourses.”27 It is crucial to think and feel indigenous, to center the indigenous as a new iteration and a new standard.28 As Allen formulates this new and critical paradigm that crosses vertical binaries, he has in mind the Native Americans and the indigenous peoples of the Pacific. I, however, would like to expand this paradigm to include the indigenous species of the ocean. The purpose is twofold. As center-to-center dialogues, the indigenous texts I examine in this article avoid the fallacy of anthropocentricism, viewing both human and nonhuman as centric. They all, furthermore, celebrate transindigenous (i.e., indigenous-to-indigenous) connection. Within a center-to-center, indigenous-to-indigenous context, these narratives take a different form from what we might expect from a narrative organized around the (vertical and asymmetrical) indigenous-invader binary opposition. They figure deep transpacific connections, free of the colonial and anthropocentric relations of center and margin, major and minor.In Eyes in the Sky, Rapongan revives the Tao traditional knowledge of the sea ecology with a story of a whale that guides the protagonist through the huge ocean. In The Whale Rider, Witi Ihimaera updates the Maori myth of how humans arrived at Aotearoa (New Zealand) on the back of a whale. In People of the Whale, Native American Linda Hogan rewrites the story of the Makah whale hunt in order to weave in the human connections to the companion species and the ecosystems in which they dwell. Breathing air and yet at home in the ocean rather than on land, whales bridge the divides between land and sea, human and nonhuman, blurring the boundaries of our rational dichotomy. In all these narratives, whales and other ocean species and beings represent a radical alterity, revealing the discontent of modern civilization, which privileges the story of human progress and sets humans apart from nonhuman species. All three authors characterize the endangered sea animals as ancestors. All three bespeak an environmental ethics and an ecopoetics that honors the rich diversity and interconnectedness of the Pacific ecology and that considers the historical and cultural bonds between human and nonhuman, environment and creature, and past and present. They redeem human animals, giving them a place in the cosmos, and materialize the dialogues between human and sea animals in the form of ancestors. In each of these texts, the asymmetry of the binary hierarchy (center vs. liminal, major vs. minor) is radically challenged, the separation between the human and nonhuman is collapsed, and multiple narratives related to humans and other species are juxtaposed to configure center-to-center, indigenous-to-indigenous dialogues and interconnectedness.In these center-to-center, indigenous-to-indigenous dialogues, a multispecies continuum becomes visible. The interchanges between the human and ocean species shape the multiple, divergent communities of the waters. The boundary—or, rather, the binary relationship—between human and nonhuman is perpetually blurred in the presence of a multispecies world. Deborah Bird Rose calls for renewed attention to “situated connectivities that bind us into multi-species communities.”29 The term “multispecies” refers to an anthropology “that is not just confined to the human but is concerned with the effects of our entanglements with other kinds of living selves,” such as “animals, plants, fungi, and microbes once confined in anthropological accounts to the realm of zoe or ‘bare life’—that which is killable—[which] have started to appear alongside humans in the realm of bios, with legibly biographical and political lives.”30 To lay bare “the emergence of multispecies ethnography,” S. Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich locate their discussion within contemporary debates regarding “becomings” with respect to the conceptual questions about the definition of “culture” and “species.” Different “becomings” abound in the scholarship of the emergence of multispecies ethnography. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari define “becoming” in terms of “alliances,” preferring a horizontal “rhizome” over a vertically oriented classificatory or genealogical tree.31 Deviating from Deleuzian “becoming,” Celia Lowe puts forth “new kinds of relations emerging from nonhierarchical alliances, symbiotic attachments, and the mingling of creative agents,” new kinds of relations in which “becoming transforms types into events, objects into actions.”32 While Deleuze and Guattari essentially relate “becoming-animals” to human beings, Celia Lowe treats species as “creative agents” and argues along the line of the “species turn,” an idea introduced by Donna Haraway. “If we appreciate the foolishness of human exceptionalism,” Haraway writes in When Species Meet, “then we know that becoming is always becoming with—in a contact zone where the outcome, where who is in the world, is at stake.”33 Deleuze and Guattari depart from “patrilineal thinking, which sees all the world as a tree of filiations ruled by genealogy and identity [and] wars with rhizomatic thinking, which is open to nonhierarchical becomings.”34 I move beyond Deleuzian anthropocentricism, siding with multispecies ethnographers who study contact zones where lines separating nature from culture have blurred or disappeared and where encounters between Homo sapiens and other beings generate mutual ecologies, anticipating the emergence of the “alterworlds” of other living beings. At the end of Alien Ocean, an ethnography that newly imagines the relationship of ocean life to human life, Helmreich asserts that we are witnessing “the saturation of human nature by other natures.”35In People of the Whale, Hogan dramatizes such saturation, creating a world of myth, songs, and prayers. In this tale set on the Pacific Northwest Coast, the fictional A'atsika people have “songs about the ocean, songs to the ocean.” They declare: “We live on the ocean. The ocean is a great being…. It is a place where people's eyes move horizontally because they watch the long, wide sea flow into infinity.”36 On the day after the protagonist, Thomas W. Just, is born, an octopus walks out of the sea and appears in the village. The tribal elders do not hesitate to identify it as one of the three significant sea creatures (whale, sea lion, and octopus) that in ancient times brought good fishing and were worshiped by humans (17). The old people retain the old ways; early each morning they sing “powerful, old, and still-remembered songs” (17). Thomas is the grandson of Witka, the tribe's respected whaler and seer who carries the gifts of the spirits. Witka “was the last of those who could go under the sea holding his breath for long times and remain, so he had a great deal of knowledge about the ocean an all sea life” (18). He “spoke with the whales, entreated them, and asked, singing with his arms extended” (18). Hogan opens her narrative with the interconnectedness between Witka and whales based on symbiotic alliances. By extending his arms, he symbolically embraces the whales as relations since humans and whales share common means of communication and interaction.Hogan's novel pivots on the intimate relationship between ocean creatures and human life, thereby making the tribal community a multispecies one. Everyone is pure in heart and mind, and so the whales will come gladly toward the village. As they come, Witka offers songs and addresses them as “brother, sister whale” and “Grandmother whale, Grandfather whale” (22). In other words, they are “all my relations.” They are the host of organisms whose lives and deaths, arrivals and departures, are linked to human social worlds, as Witka sings: “If you come here to land we have beautiful leaves and trees. We have warm places. We have babies to feed and we'll let your eyes gaze upon them. We will let your soul become a child again. We will pray it back into a body. It will enter our bodies. You will be part human. We'll be part whale. Within our bodies, you will dance in warm rooms, create light, make love…. Then one day I will join you” (22–23). Whales appear alongside humans in the realm of bios with biological, social, and cultural significance. Hogan writes of whales making love and “becoming human” and thus rejects the oversimplified model of Deleuzian “becoming animal,” moving beyond the human to celebrate the human mingling with other kinds of living selves.Thomas's wife, Ruth, likewise has a close affinity with ocean creatures. She was born with gill slits, and yet she was not first of their people to share a genetic bond with the ocean, for “it had happened before, children being born with gills” (27). On her wedding night, she is said to look like a spirit that could walk the ocean pathway made by the moon on water, like the woman in one of their stories. In this story, “the woman and moon together created the cycles of growing plants, the movement of tides, and the falling rain” (27–28). A common temporal frame or natural rhythm appears, observed by both the human and the environment. Human nature is saturated by other natures. So Thomas's birth is blessed by the visit of the octopus (15–17), and so Witka, “who loved and visited the whales to ensure a good whale hunt,” has come by “a great deal of knowledge about the ocean and all sea life” (18). Water was not really a place for humans, but “Witka the whale hunter has courage…. He learned the songs and prayers. By the age of five he had dreamed the map of underwater mountains and valleys, the landscape of rock and kelp forests and the language of currents. He had an affinity for it” (19). Witka displays an emotion-laden preoccupation with his physical environment, which turns out to be defined by his biological bond with the ocean. The whale contains humanity, while Witka learns to be a whale. Humans and whales constitute mutual ecologies.The title “People of the Whale” indicates a sea lineage and the text is full of imagery reinforcing this idea. There is the close affinity between humans and jellyfish, swaying kelp forests, flying mantas, and sea turtles (36). Ruth pulls her dreams and memories into a net like a school of silver fish (37). People of the whale “come out in the ocean, come out on strands of seaweed, some carried, with their stories in their arms and on their backs or carried on the fins of the water animals” (43). The story of the whale is the story of “their ancestor,” while “all their stories clung like barnacles to the great whale, the whale they loved enough to watch pass by” (43). The narrative proclaims that “they were people of the whale” and that “they worshiped the whales” (43); what is “lost and needy and inside them all was a drive from the past they carried like DNA, a drive to return” (81–82). DNA is their genetic coding; the linkage to the ocean and whales has come as a blood memory that they inherit from their ancestor, the whale. The genealogy the Native American poet John Trudell suggests for the acronym “DNA”—“descendants now ancestors”—includes both humans and whales.37The A'atsika people trace their ancestry to the whales; the rock carvings show human beings “being born of the whales” (267). Born with webbed feet and able to dive in the ocean for long periods of time, Thomas's son, Marco, is a transformational being who inhabits the contact zone between land and sea and enlivens the biocultural realm of the A'atsika people. Both Witka and Marco are human/whale beings and come to represent the relationship between humans and other than humans. Through these connectivities among multiple species that are revived by stories, songs, and myths, the A'atsika people conduct their interrelational lives with whales. At the end of the novel, Marco disappears “in the bloody thrashing” (97) of a young whale as it is dying, proclaiming “we are its relatives” (99).The disappearance of the young whale and indigene indicates that Hogan is not romanticizing the fictional A'atsika tribe as one untouched by colonialism and modernity. Setting her novel in the changing modern world, she states explicitly that before Thomas was born, the forests had been clear cut and the whales overhunted: Nearby fishing towns are now abandoned. As is the sawmill in disrepair, the forest missing…. These places truly existed, the secret places where houses were made of shells. Royal ships once anchored there; those who kept journals said the houses were made of pearls. No one sees them now except as a memory made of words. One man passing by at sunset wrote, in 1910, that they were made of rainbows, but of course no one believed him. This was also the year the deadly influenza arrived with the white whalers. The houses of shells wer